Madame Verdurin and the Avenger

 

In Uri Eisenzweig’s magisterial Fictions de l’anarchisme, on page 57, mention is made of Clément Duval, who is included among the “mi-révolutionnaires and the illégalistes”. In a footnote, we are told his “affaire” preoccupied anarchist circles in the 1886–1887 period. Eisenzweig’s book is intended to touch on anarchy and the literature of the period, as well as giving us a proto-history of terrorism as a particular discursive device, and Duval was merely a small figure in this theme.

A good book. One review remarked: “Complex analyses — always accompanied by a great attention to the sources, the texts — develops the thesis according to which these provocations [of the anarchist movement] translate a crisis as to the capacity of language to transmit a « realistic » perception of social relations ; a crisis that touched, of course, on the confidence in parliamentary rule, but also, more generally, on the status of communication — thus, of literature…”

So: a name, Clément Duval. I came upon it as an innocent. I know of Sacco and Vanzetti, I know a bit about the Bonnet gang, I know that Carla Tresca was murdered by Stalinists. A little learning, but I come from the Marx side of things, generally. It is only that: lately, I have wondered if maybe it is anarchy, mutual aid as Kropotkin put it, that will save us.

Salvation, which I once thought of as bourgeois mystification, I now think of as a historical necessity. I grow old, I grow old.

I liked the idea of mi-revolutionnaires and illegalists. So I started to research the “affaire Duval.” Which brought me to an address: 31 Rue de Monceau.

A pretty and expensive part of Paris, today. A pretty and expensive part of Paris in the 1880s, too.

I have been thinking about addresses in Paris. I’ve been thinking of city novels and addresses. I’ve been thinking that in the streets of certain cities, certain capitals, there are ghosts. Ghosts of historic events. And ghosts of faits divers. The outlaw event, the irregularity. Didier Decoin wrote: “what seduces us are the “little people” of the fait divers.” In opposition to a history of great events and great people.

An opposition that, like the old regime that forged it, has not entirely crumbled.

In a sense, as my research began to make clear, Clément Duval’s entire life was spent attacking that opposition; which implies, like all such blind and heady attacks, a certain dependence on the opposition.

2.

Clement DuvaL

I’ve come to think there’s a certain guilt about Clément Duval. Not a guilt among the guilty — the powerful, the police, the capitalists, etc. No, a guilt among the comrades. A guilt in the leftwing, anti-statist circles that knew about him.

Octave Mirbeau wrote: “The old world crumbles under the weight of its sins. It will light the bomb that will blow it up. And that bomb will certainly contain neither gunpowder nor dynamite. It will contain the Idea and the Pity: two forces without which one can do nothing.” Mirbeau’s prophecies, of the 1890s apply comprehensively to Clément Duval, but they were written with the famous Ravachol in mind — a much more bloodstained, a much more liminal, a much more psychologically disturbed figure. I believe — or at least the story of Duval has features that make me believe — that he was not only abused by the system — but was, perhaps, set up.

3.

That’s pure speculation on my part. Nobody else says it.

Duval, by profession a locksmith, was a member of the Batignolle Panther, an anarchist group whose choice of totem animal did not, I believe, influence the choice of the same totem for the Black Power militants of the 1960s. However, under the surface, leftist touches leftist, situation situation, courtroom theatre, courtroom theatre. Who knows what rumors Huey Newton might have heard?

It was in 1886 when the Duval affair reached the Paris papers. Duval and a mysterious man named Turquais or Turquet, resolved to put into practice the slogan, expropriate the expropriators. Proudhon’s phrase, Property is Theft (a maxim that contains the essence of graffiti as the anarchist weapon of choice) had been absorbed into the anarchist community. The “right to theft”, which had, they claimed, been the property of the upper class, was to become the property of those bold enough among the workers to claim it. Thievery on a mass scale — capitalism — was to be met with thievery on an individual scale — anarchy. The target they chose was, to say the least, peculiar: a two story town house in which a fashionable painter, Madame Lemaire, lived and worked. On October 6, 1886, at 31 Rue Monceau, a fire broke out — a fire set by robbers. Let me quote Maitron, the indispensable site for radical history:

« Some days later, following a raid on a person named Didier, a fence, Clément Duval was arrested — not without having wounded Officer Rossignol with some superficial knife blows — as being the author of the robbery. Imprisoned in Mazas, he wrote on October 24, 1886 to Le Révolté (n° 6, du 12 novembre 1886) to justify himself in the name of the theories he exposed in court.”

In Duval’s memoir, translated into English by Michael Shreve, Duval describes the circumstances that led to him being tried for attempted murder:

“You are accused of the attempted murder of Sergeant Rossignol. When this officer was investigating Didier with the chief of detectives, Didier’s wife pointed you out as Duval to the officer. He asked you to follow him to talk to the chief of detectives. You answered that you had no business with him and he wasn’t one of your friends. Seeing this, the officer identified himself as a sergeant of the police and arrested you in the name of the law. You answered him: ‘Ah! Scum, in the name of freedom I’ll strike you down!’ And you stabbed him eight times with a handmade dagger, intending to kill him.”

“I only struck Sergeant Rossignol twice and not eight times. If I’d stabbed him eight times, being all worked up by the surprise at being arrested as I was, he would probably not be here to testify. It was a scratch, a scrape that he got when we fell off the sidewalk. Unfortunately, he dragged me down with him in his fall, otherwise neither he nor Officer Pelletier, who was with him, would have arrested me.”

“So, you would have killed them both?”

“No, I would have defended my freedom. But I couldn’t. Officer Pelletier right away took advantage of my fall by grabbing me by my throat and my private parts; and Rossignol was able to get hold of my right thumb and bite it.”

4.

A certain air of farce. Officer Rossignol. Officer Nightingale. The grabbing of the private parts, the biting of the thumb.

5.

Albert Bataille, in his early thirties at the time, covered the trial for the Figaro. Bataille was trained as a lawyer. Among his colleagues, he was known for his energy and persistence: “Leaning his head over his pad of paper, pen in hand, he would report on what he was seeing for five or six hours at a time. … He grasped on the fly sudden incidences that would cause a shock, he’d extract from interrogatories everything that was pertinent, susceptible to enlighten the reader…” In France, Bataille was known for a report maintaining that journalists should be trained as such, at the higher education level. He died in 1899 from a heart attack: “ A little tired the last two or three days”, read the report in the Figaro, “he had happily passed the evening at home, with his family. At one in the morning the first symptoms of the sickness declared themselves. His entourage, and he himself, at first believed that it was only a not very serious feeling of discomfort, and soon, after taking some care, his good humor returned. It was only around seven in the morning that a new crisis occurred. He got up suddenly, then, regaining his bed, at the insistence of his poor frightened wife, he told her simply, I am lost, and died in her arms.”

Bataille described Duval like this, on January 14, 1887: “Duval is a bad boy around thirty years old, hairy, with an evil squint, a bushy moustache, a line in bibulous talk, a sinister clown who posed himself before the jury without seeing that he was playing for his head.”

Posed. A threatrical term. One used by Duval himself — he spoke, once, about being “posed” — playing the role of — the accused. The dramaturgy leaks through the legal ritual.

Yet, Bataille’s account of Duval’s street eloquence is not without a certain hint of admiration. Duval was not a buffoon, a sinister clown, however much his working class manners insulted the dignity of a courtroom that was, in its etiquette, a redoubt of esoteric and feudal gestures. His speech to the jury after they found him guilty is both moving and, for the readers of Figaro, where it appeared in Bataille’s reporting, a threat.

“I have to tell you that I am not a thief, but a rebel. I have to tell you why I am an anarchist. My lawyer has posed me here before you as the accused. But I pose myself as the accuser. If you want the head of an anarchist, here it is, take mine. But I have the right to turn to bourgeois society and ask it to account for itself. Theft, on our part, is restitution. In pillaging, as you put it, the town house of Madame Madeleine Lemaire, I committed an act of anarchy.

I’ve given the people a lesson in the deed…. I do not recognize your law. I am not a defendant — I am an avenger!”

6.

Yet was this locksmith an avenger?

Or a dupe?

For his tussle with a policeman, his stealing of silver and jewellery, and for setting a fire that burned “a portrait of Lemaire by Chaplin, a piano, and an umbrella painted by a young miss,” Duval was given the death penalty. However, because this sentence caused a stir — it is a little much to guillotine a man for scratching a plainclothes policeman and taking some thousands of dollars in jewellery that was quickly recovered — it was changed to life in the prison colony of Guyana, another sort of death sentence. Duval’s speeches had been too well reported in the papers to allow him to serve five years in some prison in France. Duval himself published, or had someone publish, a little pamphlet containing his defence. In his memoir, he claimed that 50,000 of these pamphlets were sold. So: better to bury him in the French overseas concentration camp system. Like the much more famous Henri Charrière — Papillon — he managed in the end, after 18 years, to escape his prison in Guyana. Papillon became a movie, written by Dalton Trumbo, the ex communist. In Marianne Enckell’s introduction to Duval’s memoirs, Duval is called an anti-Papillon — Papillon was, after all, a cop stooge who bowed down to the authorities, snitched, and snubbed his fellow prisoners. Duval, that hirsute locksmith, was far more guilty in the eyes of bourgeois society: he threatened it with the bomb. His Hollywood category is plainly villain.

7.

“… and Clement Duval, who made his name in 1886 by knifing a police officer.” Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: the story of America in its first age of Terror.

:… A burglar named Clement Duval, who stole from a wealthy Paris residence, was transformed into Comrade Duval.” John Merriman, The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror.

“… Clement Duval, a notorious robber who justified his profession as a redress of social oppression.” Louis Patsouras, Crucible of Socialism.

Inglory is one of the great tools of bourgeois historiography. When that tool is seized — as in the recent case of the 1619 affair — there is a veritable explosion in the club. It is as if by some inadvertence, some failure of the police -the cultural police — Clément Duval or his type — mounts to the judge’s seat and issues sentence. It is as if the avenger were at the door. Clément Duval is a perfect stooge for writers who reckon that the terrorism of the anarchists and the terrorism of the Islamicists are one terror. Not included in this terror are the slave labor camps of the French and the British, the bombs, trenches, poison gas, missiles, white potassium, napalm and other of the ordinary paraphernalia of policing situations. There is no connection made between oppression and terrorism. Except to say that those who point out the oppression are justifying the terrorism

And to say back: those who are pointing out the terrorism are justifying the oppression. Flip the coin: on both sides, there’s faces.

8.

There are so many perspectives, infinite perspectives, in which a person can be seen, and the sum of these is a difficulty for novelist, policeman, anarchist, artist and the angels of God. Even those celestial recorders with their data. What does it profit an angel if they mark down a theft and lose their own souls?. Was Duval the anti-Papillon, the avenger even in chains? Paul Mimande, a journalist, went to Guyane in 1894 and wrote a reportage: Among the anarchist felons. As a senior convict, Duval was a mentor to many of those sent to the prison camps as the French Republic cracked down on political dissent. Mimande went and interviewed certain names that had once seemed threats to the bourgeois order. Duval was living, then, on one of the island camps, in a hut. He’d returned to his old job as locksmith. When Mimande asked his police guide about Duval, he was told that he no longer had the “hand” of a good locksmith, but: “… he is full of good will, no transferee is as submissive, as gentle, as well behaved.”

Mimande found that Duval had not lost his convictions. Which bored the journalist-tourist. So he asked about his wife, the family from which he had been parted, and got a satisfactory breakdown, tears, some ragged regrets about his wife. Mimande was satisfied.

Mimande’s account is of a different Duval than the one who penned the memoirs. Far from being submissive, Duval made 18 attempts to escape and he aided in a failed rebellion. He finally did escape in 1901. His memoirs, which recount his life in Guyana among the political prisoners, don’t give the details of that escape. Duval did not think of himself as an adventurer. He was an avenger.

9.

Among the anarchists, from the very beginning, there were agents provocateurs. Agent provocateurs, either hired by the cops or by the wealthy, were scattered among anarchists groups like a cluster of raisons in a pain aux raisons. The first French anarchist paper, La Révolution sociale, in 1880, was founded by Égide Spilleux, who it turned out was on the payroll of the police chief, Louis Andrieux. Duval would surely have known this. Spilleux was unmasked in 1881.

In the Affaire Duval, there is a mysterious gap, from the beginning. Duval, when he was caught, spoke of one Turquais. Or Turquet. “I met him boulevard de la Chapelle. I initiated him into anarchism. I showed him our newspapers, which are made by workers and not journalists. And then he indicated to me a good job. (with the voice of a villain in a melodrama) The day came at last to break open the strong boxes of the rich! (general hilarity).”

Another version: “I was out of work last September. My boss, to whom I had been denounced as a member of the anarchist group, the Panther of Batignolles, threw me out on the pavement. One day, in the square of Villette, I came upon Turquet sitting on a bench, not less desperate than me. We spoke of social injustice, and I showed him that it was time for anarchists to act against the propertied class. I told him that I had fabricated a jimmy for stealing, hoping by this example to give courage to the workers, who will not be free until they have blown open the safes of their bosses. It is Turquet who proposed that we rob Madame Lemaire.”

Duval did not disclaim the idea behind his crime; but his forging of a “pince” a burglar’s tool for forcing open locked drawers was as far as he had gotten. He was a talker, Duval. He wanted to “teach” the working man. Hypothesis: this is the very type of gull that the agent provocateur preys on.

Turquet knew of Madame Lemaire. How? This uncaught presence knew a place. Don’t they always? It was Turquet who shimmied over a wall, and let Duval in to the garden of the apartment. Turquet, when they got to Suzanne Lemaire’s room, the daughter of the painter, read her letters and scattered them on the carpet. They must have gone through the atelier. They must have recognized it as such. A place of work. Turquet set fire to the house, the latter over Duval’s objections. Not that Duval was against the arson for bourgeois reasons! Duval does not come out and say it, but he evidently thought arson would endanger the other people in the town house. The Judge and prosecutor laughed at Duval’s claims. Where was this Turquet? The police could not find him. Although Duval never expressed this, either at the trial or in his memoirs, there is something funny about Turquet, something that bothered Duval enough that, even though he took on himself the guilt, or the glory of the burglary, he compulsively told on Turquet. Even as he exculpated the two others who were on trial with him.

Was there really a Turquet? Was Turquet, the man conveniently on that bench, really… an agent provocateur?

Duval’s testimony, as it is reported in the different papers, makes for a slightly confused transcript, since different reporters hear different things. One collates, one gets a broad picture from the stories. But the overall tone of the courtroom is pretty clear, with the President of the court and the prosecutor either sneering or indignant, and Duval acting as he must have imagined he would act, if given a chance: as though he were turning his deed back into words, words that would penetrate the hard of hearing bourgeois world — as well as reaching the masses. He was there to testify, to tell a story, to make a courtroom procedure about a crime into a agit-prop drama about a person. The courtroom was where he could testify about his own existence; for him, the judge, the partial and stooge like “President”, was a kind of prop bourgeois in a scenario he and his anarchist group knew well.

Knew as a caricature. In the same way they were known by the judge, the reporters, the middle class readers, as caricatures. Caricature faces caricature. On both sides, there’s faces. He was proud of stealing, but never showed that he was an egotist about it, a disciple of Stirner. It was a deed clearly led to by the logic of anarchism, but it was a deed that was, primarily, for anarchism. He was clear that he was not stealing for his wife and family. In previous seasons of poverty, he had stolen a crust of bread, vegetables to feed himself and his wife, but these were not anarchist thefts. The robbery of 31 Rue Monceau was for money to fund the cause. It was for weapons, it was for printing presses. Which makes it all the more puzzling that he would try to hide his tracks through a fire, and all the more plausible that this really was not his idea.

Even at the time, even among sympathizers like the group that published Cry of the People, there were discussions of Duval’s individualist expropriation. Wasn’t theft itself always theft? If property was theft, that doesn’t mean one was therefore, justified in stealing property. Or was this to continue the chain of (socially evil) being. The mirror doesn’t destroy the room it reflects, it simply reflects it as another piece of furniture.

10.

Duval was asked if he knew Madam Lemaire. “No. But Mme. Lemaire is part of the collectivity of parasites which gnaw the worker and nourish themselves on their sweat, so I accepted to do the job. I must add that if I had known there was no money rue de Monceau, I would never have gone.”

According to many sources, Clément Duval escaped from the prison colony of Guyana on April 14, 1901.

Meanwhile, Madam Lemaire had settled back into her routine. Her work as an artist. Dumas fils, author of Lady of the Camillas, said Lemaire was, next to God, the greatest maker of roses. She provided illustrations for many books — including a thin, highly aesthetic book entitled Les Plaisirs et les jours. A book that caused an incident. Jean Lorrain, a self-consciously decadent writer, reviewed that book under the pseudonym Raitif de la Bretonne, and criticized not only the author, but the illustrator.

“Les Plaisirs et les Jours : serious melancholies, elegiac spinelessness… inane flirting with a precious and pretentious style, with, between the margins or at the head of the chapters, the flowers of Mme Lemaire as strewn symbols — and one of these chapters is called: the death of Baldassare de Silvande, le vicomte de Silvande. Illustration: two jugs. Another, Violante or the mondaine lifestyle. Illustration: two rose leaves (I’m not making this up). The ingeniousness of Mme Lemaire has never been so tightly adapted to the talent of the author… It is thus that a story entitled Amis: Octavian and Fabrice has for its commentary two cats playing the guitar …”

Jean Lorrain’s article goes on in this fashion, and even implied various things about the author’s supposed homosexual liaison with Lucien Daudet. If true, perhaps the rumor had travelled in the same gay circles as Lorrain, a very gay man. In any case, the author replied by challenging Lorrain to a duel.

Each shot twice at the other in the Bois de Meudon. None of the four bullets struck flesh. They both stood there and, one supposes, looked at each other, critic to author, with the author feeling justified and masculinely restored.

On May 11, 1903, a certain Dominique, the pseudonym of the author of Les plaisirs et les jours, wrote a floral article, Le cours aux lilas et l’atelier aux roses, subtitled “The Salon of Madame Madeleine Lemaire” for the Figaro. Was Duval already in New York at this point? The robbery of 31 Rue de Monceau had long been overshadowed by other, more drastic, anarchist deeds. Dominique made no mention of it. Dominique — or, to use his real name, Marcel Proust — was a regular at Madam Lemaire’s soirees. Her name figures extensively in his correspondence, notably with another regular, Reynaldo Hahn. Proust once wrote Hahn that after his Mama, he loved Hahn best. Hahn was a well known pianist, song-writer, and musical impresario. Between Proust and Hahn, in their letters, Madam Lemaire was gently mocked. Later, not so gently mocked, she inspired, in part, Madam Verdurin, with her “mincing tyranny.” Her way of ruling the “little clan” on her Tuesdays. Where Odette met, in an encounter whose modulated shock resonates throughout Proust’s novel, M. Swann.

11.

In Jean-Yves Tadié’s biography of Marcel Proust, Madeleine Lemaire is given the kind of shorthand biography that is allotted to the walk-on parts: the pupil of her aunt, Mme Herbeline — who owned the townhouse at 31 rue de Monceau — “a classical talent, secondary but varied” — friend of “tout Paris”. According to Martin Battersby in The World of Art Nouveau, where she engrosses a whole chapter along with a rival flower painter, Louise Abbama, she was accorded the title of Professor at The Museum of Natural History in Paris. Not that Battersby’s judgment of Lemaire’s work is unabashedly positive. He rounds up his chapter with this paragraph:

“Very few of these women painters achieved more than a mediocre standard and one of the more onerous duties of critics was to attend the annual “Salon des Femmes Peintres’ which had been inaugurated in 1881. ‘They would be better employed in devoting themselves to embroidery’, sighed one critic, but there is no use in telling them — they will do it.”

12.

Dominique’s account of Madame Lemaire begins with a pastiche of Balzac that one can’t imagine a society columnist getting away with today. We begin with the neighborhood, and come upon a certain disturbance in the street order:

“… a small townhouse which, contemptuous of all wayfare regulations, advances by a foot and a half on the sidewalk, which thus renders the street hardly wide enough to park cars on…”

The house, for Dominique, still writing under the guise of imitating Balzac, is a symbol for the painter and hostess who lives in it, for it “stops the passerby.” “One senses immediately that its proprietor must be one of those strangely powerful personages, before the caprices or habits of whom all powers must bend, for whom the ordonnances of the Prefecture of the Police and the decisions of the municipal council remain dead letters.”

The strange power that puts at naught the state, or its representatives. One wonders: is this what Duval saw? Did he and his friend Turquet “case” the joint?

Proust at this point was exploring the mysteries of different levels and forms of power — that of literature, that of the society hostess and that of her guest, that of the aristocracy and that of the bourgeois parvenu. As he wrote to Jacques Riviere, he constructed his novel on “many planes”. It is at one of Lemaire’s Tuesdays that Proust met Robert de Montesquieu, who became as important for Proust the novelist (the “model” for Baron de Charlus) as Oliver St. John Gogarty was for Joyce the novelist (the “model” of Buck Mulligan). Thus, from the atelier and salon of 31 Rue de Monceau sprang two of the great figures in A la recherche du temps perdus.

An address is an encounter. An event — which is the form taken by encounters, and which is, at the same time, irreducible to them.

And in the assault on 31 Rue de Monceau, Clément Duval made his mark on history — history as faits divers, history of little people — for which he paid with his remaining life.

13.

Posing. As regards posing. There’s a passage about the Verdurin salon. Swann comes in looking for Odette. She isn’t there. He leaves. The little clan discusses Swann — that mover between spheres, that man who is, although the Verdurin don’t know it, a personal friend of the Prince of Wales. There is some discussion about if there is something “going on” between Swann and Odette. Monsieur Verdurin remarks that even if there was, the little clan wouldn’t know about it, because it would be a matter between the two people involved.

“She would have told me,” answered Mme Verdurin with pride. “I may say that she tells me everything. As she has no one else at present. I told her that she ought to sleep with him. She makes out that the can’t; she admits, she was immensely attracted to him at first; but he’s always shy with her, and that makes her shy with him. Besides, she doesn’t care for him in that way…”

“You’ll permit me not to be of your opinion,” said M. Verdurin, “he is only half on my good side, this gentleman, and I find him a poser.”

‘Mme Verdurin stiffened, put on an inert expression, as if she were becoming a statue, a fiction that permitted her to seem like she had not heard that insupportable word, poser, which had the air of implying that one could “pose” with them, thus that one was “more than them.””

To pose. To pose in a courtroom or a salon. A salon that, once infected with the suspicion of the poser, might well erode the mysterious power it held, might dissolve the little clan. A suspicion held off by posing — posing as a statue.

Just as a too radical emphasis on the pose one held as the accused might make it seem all too arbitrary whether one was the accused or the accuser, the judge or the avenger.

14.

« Princesse, I am not going to speak to you about the war. I have, alas! Assimilated it so completely that I cannot isolate it, I can no longer speak of the hopes and fears it inspires in me than one can speak of sentiments that one experiences so profoundly that they no longer can be distinguished from oneself. It is less for me an object (in the philosophical sense of the word) than a substance interposed between me and the objects. As one loves in God, I see in the war (you know those neuralgias that one does not cease to feel as one speaks of other things, and even while one sleeps).” Proust, letter to madame Dimitri Soutzo, April, 1918.

Proust was not alone to “see” in war — this became the twentieth century experience, but he was aware of this as few of his contemporaries were.

The world after the war was tough on the world of the Verdurins. New fashions, new morals, new people, new money. It was, as well, tough on the utopias that drove the anarchists. Instead of the stateless future, the future of the collapse of the capitalist class, the future of mutual aid, utopia gravitated to the Bolsheviks.

Paul Avrich interviewed an anarchist named Florence Rossi in Needham Massachusetts on February 14, 1988. The anarchist comrades in Needham were recruited, as in many Massachusetts communities, from the Italian immigrant community. Rossi, along with her partner, Raffaele Schiavina (aka “Bruno”) were editors of L’Adunta dei Refrattari, the “principle Italian anarchist paper in the United States from the 1920s through the 1960s”.

“Clemente Duval lived with us for a while before his death. He had been living with a shoemaker in Brooklyn named Olivieri, but his house was next to the subway and Nonno — that’s what we called Duval — couldn’t sleep. So we moved to Brooklyn from New Jersey and he moved in with us. He was small, old and disfigured from arthritis. But he exercised every morning and a French comrade, Dr. Guilhempe, used to come to examine him. The neighbors thought he was Bruno’s father. He lived with us for a few months. He felt he was going to die and didn’t want to cause use any trouble, so he returned to Olivieri, where he died two days later.”

From Duval’s pamphlet, quoted in his memoir:

“And do you think that a worker with unselfish, noble sentiments can see this picture of human life constantly unroll before his eyes without revolting against it? He who feels all its effects and who is constantly its victim, morally, physically, and materially; he whom they take at twenty years old to pay the blood tax, to use his flesh against bullets to defend the properties and privileges of his masters; and he comes back from this slaughter crippled by it or with a sickness that makes him half-disabled, that makes him roll from hospital to hospital, using his flesh for the experiments of the Gentlemen of Science. I know what I’m talking about: I came back from this carnage with two wounds and rheumatism, sicknesses that have already earned me four years in the hospital and that prevent me from working six months of the year.”

Life sentences, that is what we rebel against. And the sentence keeps winning.

Madeleine Lemaire — the Patronne, or Boss, to her coterie, a bourgeois parasite to a thirty year old Clément Duval, someone he mysteriously knew of to the mysterious Turquet — died in 1928. Aux écoutes, a scandal sheet — Eavesdropper would be a good translation — published a very mean spirited obsequy, like some sort of monologue by Baron de Charlus: The Empress of roses.

Here’s how the obsequy ends:

“A sincere artist whose inspirations were without doubt limited, but with a perfect sensibility, Madeleine Lemaire suffered, and horribly, from the sort of disdain that had fallen on her painting. In these last years she received, to finish her off, two cruel blows to the heart. The first before the Nympheas of Claude Monet, which she could not understand, posing this tormenting question to her spirit: Aren’t my flowers as good as the flowers of Giverny? The second blow by an afternoon at the Salle Drouot [an auction house], They were selling a collection in which figured many Madeleine Lemaires. She wanted to know “how much that would bring in”.

The most beautiful, an immense aquarelle, sold for 150 francs. And the artist went out, her eyes humid, feeling that she was finished, that fate had shot its arrow and she was now obsolete…”

Or, as Duval might put it, once bourgeois society has no more use for you, they throw you away like a used rag.

Proust’s Madam Verdurin, in Time Rediscovered, marries twice after the death of her husband, each one bringing her higher into the social circles she so envied and derided in her own little clan. In Proust’s novel, Elstir — that representative of modern art, Monet and Manet in one — is far from being a stranger to the Verdurins. But he leaves that circle when Madam Verdurin interferes too much in his private life.

This is what Proust writes about the death of Monsieur Verdurin. “For every death is for others a simplification of existence, takes away the scruple of having to show one’s gratitude, the obligation to visit. It is in no other way that the death of M. Verdurin was received by Elstir.”

What Proust didn’t imagine was the evaporation of all these scruples before Madam Verdurin’s death, the cold hard marking down of her work in some auction hall, and her afterlife as merely the key to a certain character in a famous novel.

Or did he?

“As one loves in God, I see in the war…”

Protagoras and AI: Boxers, come out of your corners.

There are two stories about Protagoras. In the hostile account of his life written by Diogenes Laertius, it is said that he was a porter, a relatively humble position, and that he invented a porter’s pad for carrying things. But in Philostratas’s Lives of the Sophists he is given a much grander birth, being the son of a wealthy citizen of Abdera who “amassed wealth beyond most men in Thrace”, and who entertained King Xerxes in his house. Philostratus claims that this Persian connection effected Protagoras’s thinking, since he became versed, to an extent, in the doctrines of the Persian magi. Whereas Diogenes Laertius (writing with all the snobbery of the ancient world at his back) attributes Protagorus’s education to Democritus, who was impressed by Protagoras’s invention of the porter’s pad. Somehow, this story rings with the implication of slander – it gives Protagoras’s cunning all too menial a cast. And yet Diogenes also casually attributes the invention of philosophy by dialogue, or the Socratic method, to Protagoras – a rather big invention, the invention of a form, which Diogenes, in his usual way, mentions and goes on. The  biographies of the Philosophers tumble and jumble off the page like some inventory landslide, leaving us frustrated, howling outside of the sacked walls for more. 

One thing that is agreed between Philostratus and Diogenes is that Protagorus, like Socrates, was accused in Athens of disbelief in the Gods. In Philostratus, his person was condemned, and he fled from place to place like a philosophical Flying Dutchman, seeking refuge, until he drowned in a shipwreck. Diogenes L, however, maintains merely that his book, On the Gods, was burned in Athens. He read this book, supposedly, at Euripides house. The scandalous import of the book comes out in Diogenes quotation: “As to the Gods, I have no means of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist. For many are the obstacles that impede knowledge, both the obscurity of the question and the shortness of human life.”

This quotation, of course, doesn’t tell us much about the argument that Protagoras develops about the gods; for after all, the argument might show that most probably, they exist, and that their existence is bound up in our not knowing. Or otherwise. Protagoras’s life – which is a bit undecidable itself – might have provided a good context in which to ponder undecidablity and the shortness of human life. Surely some echo of Protagoras’s phrase is contained in the story, in Acts, that Paul discovered an altar in Athens inscribed, to the unknown God.

I have always found Protagoras a sympathetic figure, whether or not he came from the working class. He has been demonized for millenia as the “founder” of relativism. One of Protagoras’s book, lost like all of them, has the nice, Nietzschian title of “Truth, or The Overthrower” - (Kataballontes Logoi). What we have from Protagoras (as though proving the shortness of man’s life has an imminent effect on what he can know) is fragments, the most famous of which, pondered wonderfully in the Theaetetus, is: ‘Of all things, the measure is man, of things which are, that they are, of things which are not, that they are not.’ What this means is elusive, of course. It is not that man is the inventor of all things – nor does it say that things do not exist outside of man. These are, of course, possible interpretations. But it puts man in the position of “measurer”, and in one sense that goes well with the Pythagorian viewpoint according to which number is at the ontological base of things. Yet in another sense, it displaces number with the measurer – begging the question of whether measure itself “depends” on man.

Myself, I think the measure fragment links up to what DL claims about Protagoras’s invention of the socratic dialogue for doing philosophy. DL writes that Protagoras was the first to say “that on everything (pragmatos) there are two accounts (logous) opposed each other.” This would seem to make  “man”  the measurer a more suspect unity; for if pragmatos is the kind of thing that is subject to exponential account making, it might be more reasonably said that of all things, the measureless is man. Plato of course saw this, but he nevertheless decided that “man” meant an aggregate of individuals, each person, instead of something like Dasein, or the collectivity of the human, divided within itself. If we are seeking the geneology of what Bakhtin calls “broadness” – the way many views, acts, desires and beliefs can be attributed to persons, without there being a core coherence – then we would have to start, I think, with Protagoras.

There is a story about Protagoras that is recounted in Plutarch’s life of Pericles that exemplifies this theme. Pericles bratty son published a “Daddy Dearest” book trying to mock Pericles for, among other things, hanging with the sophists. “For instance, a certain athlete had hit Epitimus the Pharsalian with a javelin, accidentally, and killed him, and Pericles, Xanthippus said, squandered an entire day discussing with Protagoras whether it was the javelin, or rather the one who hurled it, or the judges of the contests, that "in the strictest sense" ought to be held responsible for the disaster.” This was an entire waste of time for the son, Xanthippus; but it is a moment of radical recognition that stands out in legal history, with the sense that liability can be mediate as well as immediate. But what we see, in this discussion with Pericles, is an effect of there being two sides to each question, and two sides after that – two sides, indeed, to whether the right question is being asked.

The interesting question to ask of those who oppose relativism relates to this issue of measure and measurelessness, and it is the question of the disposability of form, whether it can be discarded once we get to substance, or whether it is, indeed, so tied to substance that our abstraction of one from the other is a distortion. To put it another way, by rejecting Protagoras, which happens in the Theaetetus, is Plato actually rejecting the socratic method? Is he rejecting Socrates? For if Socrates is taking up Protagoras’s technique, it would seem, from Plato’s non-relativist view, that Socrates made a mistake, gave too much to the enemy. For Protagoras’s invention would seem designed never to get us closer to what we want - the list of imperatives in the realms of knowledge, ontology, ethics and aesthetics that can tell us what is true and what is false, what is knowledge and what isn’t, what exists and what doesn’t, what is right and what isn’t, what is beautiful and what isn’t.

With Protagoras, don’t we begin, in earnest, the battle between the dialogue and the list? A battle that each generation fights. Ours, for instance, is confronting the list disguised as dialogue - AI. Protagoras would have loved this.

Jokes in the cold war

 

Since Kundera’s death was announced, I’ve been thinking about the eighties – his great decade in America – and about rereading The Joke, his four times translated first novel.

The idea of a joke that pursues the joker and ruins his life has a lot of attraction for me. I am fascinated by jokes. But I don’t hear many anymore.

When I was in my twenties, I often found myself in the midst of a joketelling orgy – that is, I found myself among joke tellers. I’d tell some jokes myself, but I did not have the rhythm of the great joke teller. I was equipped with one advantage, however: I was a great laugher. I could laugh until, literally, I ran out of breath. Not only that, but I laughed not only at the punch line – for the punch line, for the great joke teller, is only the final touch on the whole artistic edifice, the last gargoyle, so to speak, on the cathedral of shit – but I would laugh even more at the absurdities that the joke piled up, especially if it was an obscene joke.

Obscenity requires a concatenation of circumstances that remove us more and more from social reality, and each step is funnier. In a sense, I was a strange audience for a joker, who is used to the laugh coming last, and to an air of concentration among his listeners, who are like fans in the stands, waiting for a hit.  But the talented joker would realize that though my laughter was, in a sense, a territorial incursion on the story, he could use  the rhythm my laughter threatened to interrupt to make the joke even better, even more a jazz solo.

I was also among a literary set, and some of them – notably my friend Stefan – were very aware of the joke as an artform. Stefan was a very good joke teller, but he was not a great joke teller because he was too aware of the art. Sometimes, though, when he just let his natural flow take him there, he was a great one. Joke telling, back then, had a setting: it was in a bar, or a coffee shop. It was close to a college or university. At least, for the joketellers I knew. And this closeness made jokes something like an anti-classroom. In a classroom, you read, or you talked about texts - and were talked to about texts, and were generally educated in the complexities of reflection, the necessity of critique, and the never-ending task of imagining the good life arising out of the crimes of history. The joke climbed joyously back into the crimes of history and wallowed. In the great jokes – which were almost always dirty, misogynist, homophobic, racist, etc. – liberal society, indeed any social ideal, was turned upside down, its pockets were picked, and its underwear observed – and its underwear was always dirty.

Time, man. Clocks, calanders, insert here the leaves blowing away. I’ve been freelance now for twenty-five years, and I never find myself in joke telling orgies anymore. Is it that the age for them – my twenties and thirties – has passed? Or is the joke itself falling prey to its internet counterparts – the tweet, the Instagram caricature, etc.?

Was there a special joke in the Cold War era? Something like Delillo’s Lenny Bruce monologues in Underworld?

There’s an essay by Andrei Sinyavsky, the Soviet dissident, entitled The Joke in the Joke. It is a very good essay, one of the best on jokes. Written in the early eighties, it is also rather sexist. Conservatives often complain that the use of sexism and racism as interpretive categories distorts the past. This isn’t true - they help one see more of the past. Benjamin’s dictum that every monument of civilization is also a monument of barbarism finds its practical application here.

The core of the essay – which contains some silly and some truly disgusting jokes, and ends with a misogynistic rape joke – is that jokes are philologically important, and are the popular art form, just as folktales were in the past.

“In a closed society of the Soviet type, where the parameters of self-interested and complete existence are marked by all sorts of prohibitions (especially verbal ones), the joke is the only emotional outlet. More than that, it has actually developed into a model for living and serves the function of macrocosm inside the microcosm. As such, it becomes a kind of monad of the world order. The joke is in the air, but not in the form of dust. Like a spore, which contains everything that the soul needs in embryonic form, it is capable of reproducing the organism whole at the first opportune moment. Hence its readiness to provide universal formulas, explicating the epoch, history or the nation.”

Much emphasis is put, here, on the closed society of the Soviet type. But as all wee peas in the cogs of American capitalism can testify, the prohibitions here are cruelly marked out in dollars and sense, in time devoured, in exhaustions never to be redeemed; in cross-purposes between races, classes, and “discourses” that seem to have become zones of lies entirely. Here, the joke’s redemptive purpose, its “monad-hood”, seems lost to the onrush of ever more comic catastrophes. Of that which take your breath away, you physically cannot speak. And as I am removed, now, from the culture of oral jokes, I can’t really testify as to its health. But thrust into the pseudo-society of social networks, I can testify that everything begins to look, in a ghastly but undeniable way, like a joke. So much so that it has become a joke that one can’t joke, that irony needs an emoticon to explain itself.

There’s another wonderful bit in the Sinyavsky essay that is worth digging out. Here it is:

“If it weren’t for one more characteristic feature of the joke, perhaps the most important one, we could end our story here. I am referring to the joke’s philosophical relation to the world, to things, to the old and the new, when the new is a variation on the old but is nevertheless a new variant. We can imagine the joke in the form of an endless chain which connects just about all possible human situations. It can be likened to Mendeleev’s periodic table of elements, which has empty spaces for new valences as if for new jokes. The heading for this chart consisting of humorous parables would read something like “Human Existence” or “Human Reality”.

We laugh, so we don't cry. And then we discover that we laugh cause we can't cry. And then we cry with laughter.

the hammers have boxes

 

“And Jesus said unto him, Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.”

 

 While the division of labor increases the productive power of labor, and the wealth and refinement of society, it leads to the impoverishment of the laborer until he sinks to the level of the machine. While labor incites the accumulation of capitals and thus the increasing well being of society, it makes the laborer ever more dependent on the capitalist, thrusts him into a greater competition, drives him into a rush of overproduction, from which follows an equivalent slump.” - Marx

 

Kolakowski has correctly written that Marx, unlike the socialists of the 40s, had a firmer grasp of the fact that capitalism was rooted in de-humanization. His economic analysis does not marginalize this insight, but builds upon it – which is why Marx never puts the market at the center of economic analysis, even as he is able to represent the reasons that mainstream economists do so.

 

In the Economic-Philosophical manuscripts, the figure for that de-humanization is the machine.

 

Not, I notice, an animal. Traditionally, the poor were compared to animals.  In a wonderful series of essays by Sergio della Bernardina, an ethnographer of hunting, he found that the animal is not considered a machine by the hunter. In fact, the animal – the deer, the bear, the fox – is considered a-like being. For the person,  outside of philosophy, is a matter of degrees and situations, and not an absolute. Which means that how personhood intervenes in social practice can’t necessarily be predicted from our definition of personhood – in the cases Bernardina examines, the tormenting of a bear or a bull before it is killed does not happen because its tormenters lack a sense of the animals personhood, but precisely because they want to provoke aggression on the part of the animal to which they can respond, shifting the blame for the animal’s death to the animal itself as a person responsible for lashing out, for acting badly.

In the Christian tradition, it is only recently that environmental historians have pursued the thesis that Christianity, by entrusting nature to man, devalued the environment. I am skeptical. Christianity, in the broad ancient tradition, certainly did not ascribe property to animals. They owned nothing. Yet they did have holes and nests. They had families. Christian iconography is actually replete with peaceful animals, with the redeemed sheep, with the dove, etc.

 

The animal might not have a property relationship with the world – they could be hunted, they could be sacrificed, they could be eaten – but they were, of course, God’s creation.

 

Not the machine. The machine not only has not property claim on the world – it has no home. It has no family. The son of man would not say, the chariots have sheds, the hammers have a box – although he’d know it, being a carpenters son. In the double logic of the dissolution of the human limit, when Descartes and the early modern natural philosophers compare the animal to the machine – and man, too – they both advance a new claim about the human relationship to the world (dissolving any limit to its use) while advancing a new and unrecognizable form of human – the man machine, the Other – as the human subject.

The poverty of the worker, who sinks to the state of a machine, is the flip side of the glory of the proletariat, the Other who is the subject of universal history. What does the poverty consist in? Marx sees it, of course, in terms of wealth – but also refinement – the “Verfeinerung der Gesellschaft.” I would call this poverty an imprisonment in routines. It is hard to resist jumping ahead to Freudian terms, having to do with obsessive behavior and neurosis, which, after all, is the mechanical coming to the surface – the arm or leg that doesn’t work, that has returned to dead matter.

It is easy to forget that the Descartes or Le Mettrie’s machine was an automaton, an entertainment. Court societies love F/X, whether it is Versailles, Hollywood or D.C. – but in real material terms, the automata did nothing more than demonstrate the uses of a winding mechanism. What Marx is talking about is not that kind of machine.

As Wolfgang Schivelbusch nicely puts it at the beginning of The Railway Journey, the Europe of the eighteenth century, which was still the Europe of wood and woods, of energy supplied by streams and forests, was losing its woods. He quotes Sombart – and I am going to give some elbow room here to exaggeration and the blind eye turned to the forests in America. Still, wood was becoming more expensive, and in this way an opportunity opens up for other means of energy and structure – notably, coal and iron. To which one must add that water, too, but in a new form – as steam – is part of the complex. In one of the historical ironies that the economic historian scrupulously skirts, even the Corn laws, decried for two centuries, actually contributed to the industrial revolution, for, by raising the price of grain and thus of keeping horses, they “helped replace horsepower by mechanical power in much the same way shortage of wood in 18th century Europe had accelerated the development of coal production.”

So, the older elements of life – that obsession of the romantics in perhaps the last final bloom of eotechnical Europe – were being reconfigured before Marx’s eyes. When Marx was expelled from Paris in 1845, he took the messagerie – the stagecoach – to the Belgian border. In 1848, when he was kicked out of Belgium, he took the train back to Paris.

We could measure those three years biographically – or geologically, as human technological needs produced wealth and a planetary alteration in the cosmic order we are beginning to feel.

thinking something else

 

Like many people – hell, I’m going for the vulgar generalization and saying like ever-y-body – I am always thinking of something else. I don’t think it is a bad guess that when Descartes wrote “cogito ergo sum”, he was thinking of something else – where am I going with this? Is the woman across the canal going to be in the fruitmarket again? I wonder if I should have some chicken broth? Hmm, bet those foutus Jesuits are going to piss in their gowns over this part, but ha ha – I’m out-Augustine-ing you, mes freres! Things like that.

A good deal of thinking, in my experience, is thinking of something else. I go down the street and instead of thinking about the street and its multiple ghosts and encounters, I am thinking about, say, writing about thinking of something else.

Yet the cogito’s thinking is supposedly a straight shot, from subject to object. The “else” that gets in there doesn’t figure much in philosopher talk. Yet my head is as filled with “else” as a pinball machine is filled with combination shot opportunities. Some people spill that else into conversation, making it hard to keep up – the conversational topic keeps reeling around. In moments of physical action, say in brushing my teeth, though I do look at the teeth and the foam churned up in there by the brush, I often find myself thinking of a news story, or a person in the news I hate, or the laundry, or money.

Else does not correspond directly with a logical function. It is chased about in Grice’s rules of implicature, which put a premium on pertinence. Else’s book is Tristam Shandy – or Potocki’s Manuscript found in Saragossa. Etymologically, else is an other – it is related to the Latin alius and the Greek allo. An other, a foreigner – thinking of something else has a certain retroactive power, making the subject a foreigner to itself.

To “only connect” is to come home – but the possibility, in every homecoming, is that the homecomer is alien to the home by the very nature of his trip. He’s someone else. How did he get there?

Odysseus found this out the hard way.

 

poem for Stevie Smith

Isn't it dishonesty

this felt disproportion

between the gaps in my head

and the words in my mouth?

What I do around here

What I do

Is lie in bed

Dressed in Grandma's clothes.

In the movie

The old samurai

Dusty at the entrance to the village

Unsheathes an eloquent sword

With a rusty gesture.

I can identify.

To take strategies from the fox

Arbitrager’s carnivore

To fill my hunger

Clucking like an old hen

With oafish bit players

Instead of dangerous prey...

Oh chateaux – oh bandes dessinées!

Maybe I should exit stage left.

It's the dishonor I can’t stand.

Not the woodman’s necessity sharpened axe.

For Daniel Ellsberg

The background story to the Pentagon Papers started out with a payment of 6,742 dollars. That is how much the U.S. government, in its majesty, decided to shell out to the family of Thai Khak Chuyen, who was a Vietnamese “translator and informant” who worked with the Green Berets in Laos. That the Green Berets were in Laos was, itself, a rather iffy proposition – who authorized that? And who authorized the torture and murder of “Mr. Chuyen”?

The first question is answered, in various stories about this incident, with the phrase: “covert mission.” In the semi-democracy of the United States in its Cold War phase, “covert missions” could emerge, with no traditional legal warrant, at the whim of the executive branch, and be carried out with the compliance of a Congress that took on the role of the blindfolded observer, the Daddy warbucks who passed the bills doling out money to intelligence agencies who worked for the “Defence Department”. In the end, as the Nixon regime battled to pull out with “peace and honor” from Southeast Asia, some Congress peeps even sought to exert some control over executive whim.

The Cold War foreign policy struggle was ultimately won by the Cold Warriors – Truman through Bush, the whole lot.

The second question, though, was a story now pretty much forgotten. Highlights: Mr. Chuyen appeared, or so it was thought, in a secret photo that showed him talking with a North Vietnamese officer. But he was suspected, as well, of being a channel to the South Vietnamese, to the government of Thieu. And the Central Intelligence Agency, which was ultimately pulling the strings in Laos and in much of South Vietnam, wanted to control the information that went to Thieu’s government.

Thus, Mr. Chuyen, unconsciously, was at the center of both a geopolitical and interbranch conflict.

At the same time, Mr. Chuyen had made friends with some of the Green Beret’s he was interacting with. One of them, a sergeant, Alvin L. Smith, went to Saigon with Mr. Chuyen, Phem Kim Lien, his wife, and Lien’s sister. “He was always going to Saigon with Chuyen for one thing or another. But it didn’t seem wrong until afterwards,” his Captain, Robert F. Marasco, testified.

At some point in June, 1969, questions arose about Chuyen. These questions were circumscribed by the situation of the Green Berets, who, under the indirect direction of the CIA, were part of something called Operation Gamma. Operation Gamma was enacted outside the purview of American law, and involved hazy incursions into Cambodia and Laos.

Smith “decided that because he was the only enlisted man, a non-commissioned officer, involved in the Chuyen thing, that we did not trust him and would kill him,” according to Marasco, who also said that was “ridiculous.” It might be the case that Smith had seen how killing could be done to not seem like killing – how a man could be told to head down a trail, for instance, by people who were pretty sure he wouldn’t come back. It might not have been so ridiculous.

Even for an American. For Chuyen, what happened was: the Green Beret’s arrested him, hooded him, took him to an island prison camp, pumped him full of sodium pentothal and for six days interrogated him, depriving him of sleep. But they couldn’t get him to confess.

At a certain point, then, the question was elimination, or what other people call murder. Consulting with their CIA contact in Saigon, they got an ambiguous answer. The CIA wasn’t opposed or for. They were tossing the question back to the Green Beret group. They weighed letting Mr. Chuyen go, but then, what if he spilled the beans, dread thought, to the Saigon government? Fighting for a democracy that had never been a democracy was one thing, but telling the government in Saigon what the Americans were doing was something else.

The solution came out of the Green Beret discussion, in which the options were: drop him out of a plane over the Sea, land him in Taiwan and let the secret police disappear him, garrot him, or do the right thing, the only thing – put two bullets in his head and dump the body.

Captain Marasco did the shooting. Then they dumped the body in the sea, wrapped in two iron chains. And then their consciences began to work on them.

Meanwhile, in Saigon, Ted Shackley, the CIA head, decided that they shouldn’t eliminate Chuyen. So he asked the Green Beret unit to put him in touch with Chuyen. The unit responded that he’d gone back to Cambodia. Shackley knew what that meant, so he laid the matter down with General Abrams – making it an army matter. The army investigated, questioning the CIA contact in Saigon, who said: “I advised Major Crew that eliminating Chuyen couldn’t be approved. However, I did say it was the most efficient course of action.”

The wheels grind. The Green Beret unit is arrested on the charge of murdering Chuyen. And this is where politics enters in. Nixon’s people were advised by the CIA that if it really came to trial, they might have to testify about Operation Gamma – essentially, blowing the cover on their illegal operation. Nixon’s people did not want the cover blown on Gamma. Nixon’s people were all about delivering a hard body blow to the North Vietnamese and their allies so that Nixon would have time to withdraw with “honor” from Vietnam. But Nixon’s Defence Department was, after all, at war as well with the CIA. The Defence Department said that at the trial, they would call CIA agents to the stand.

Helms said no. No agents could be called to the stand. The Defence Department, on September 29, announced the trial couldn’t be held, and the men were free. The headline in the NYT read: ARMY DROPS BERETS’ CASE AS C.I.A. BARTS ITS AGENTS FROM TESTIFYING AT TRIAL.

The Los Angeles Times had a similar headline. It was read that morning by Daniel Ellsberg in Malibu. He had had been moving towards the decision to leak the documents he’d been copying, and that story decided the matter for him.

Mr. Cuyen’s murder was a small thing in that murderous war, and it is just its smallness that should make us wonder about Nemesis and her instruments. Out of that murder arose the decision that resulted in the publication of the Pentagon Papers. And out of that leak arose the decision to stop leaks, leading to the formation of the White House Plumbers Group. And out of that group arose a number of decisions – the burglary of Daniel Ellsburg’s psychiatrist’s office, for instance – that led up to the Watergate burglary. And out of that fifth rate affair, as Nixon called it, arose the investigations, the Senate and House Committees, and the resignation of President Nixon.

On December 29, 1972, Edward Lorenz gave a talk to the 139th meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science with the title: Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas. Scientists don’t dicker with nemesis. Novelists do. Yet at that date, all unconsciously, the splash of a weighted body being lowered into the South China Sea one June night in 1969 was causing, in its small way, the overthrow of the American emperor. Who had just celebrated the biggest landslide victory in twentieth century history.